Odds and Ends, baseball card ad 1878

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Posted By: Max Weder

This book listing showed up on-line and I thought it might be of interest:

One quarto leaf folded to make four pages, apparently paginated with the previous issue: (1)6-8. Small stain on the first page, else fine. An "amateur" newspaper, on page 7 (or the third page of the newspaper) is an advertisement that reads as follows:

"Base Ball Cards! 25 for 20 cts. Special rates to clubs. State position and name of club when ordering. Agents wanted! Send 3 ct. stamp for samples. Franklin L. Horn, Mattoon, Ills."

Within our own little circle of baseball scholars and enthusiasts debate rages over the meaning of this little advertisement, with some convinced that this is an advertisement for business or trade cards, others that it indicates a previous unknown series of amateur baseball cards, and still others believing it was an advertisement for a stillborn project proposed by the printer, with no takers. The meaning of "baseball cards" is somewhat fluid. A few cabinet photographs were issued in the 1850s, the sporting goods company; Peck and Snyder issued a few cabinet photograph cards of teams in 1869-1870; but the first use of the term to indicate what we now consider "baseball cards" usually refers to mass produced player cards issued with tobacco products in the mid-1880s. Odds and Ends is an example of an "amateur newspaper", part of a movement that started around 1805 and continued, with fits and starts, until the Great Depression, with the "golden age" of the movement between 1870-1880, and beginning in 1867, with the invention of an inexpensive "novelty press". This item might provide a vital missing link to the study of early cards, or just be a dead-end in the evolutionary development of the hobby. At any rate, a fascinating and thought provoking item.

The tinyurl for the book is http://tinyurl.com/8oll9 . If that link doesn't work, email me for the longer link. Warning: the newspaper isn't cheap (but it isn't slabbed ). Has anyone seen this before or have any information on what the cards might be that are referred to in the ad?

Mattoon baseball's history is listed at http://www.coleshistory.org/baseball/ProfessionalBallSummary.htm

There's a good listing of baseball references in Mattoon at http://www.coleshistory.org/baseball/chrontable.htm but they don't make any reference to the baseball cards.

Max

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Posted By: barrysloate

I'd like to know what cabinet cards were issued in the 1850's, when the medium of photography then was almost exclusively daguerreotypes and ambrotypes.